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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Reprise Review: Adrift in the Sound by Kate Campbell

Genre:
Contemporary Fiction

Description:

Lizette is
a gifted abstract painter with severe personality issues—perhaps
bi-polar—although I don’t believe this was stated. Pressured to
achieve as a child, when her artist mother committed suicide
something snapped inside Lizette. Estranged from her father, she
drifts into bad company, and makes unwise life-choices. The story
follows Lizette as she struggles with mental illness and searches for
meaning in her life. Although set in the Seventies, no attachment
with that era is required to connect with this story.

Author:

“A
novelist, journalist and photographer, Kate Campbell grew up in San
Francisco and has lived and worked throughout California and the
West. Adrift in the Sound,
was a finalist for New York's 2011 Mercer Street Books Literary
Prize. Campbell's environmental and political writing appears
regularly in newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S. She lives
in Sacramento and, in addition to writing fiction and poetry,
publishes the Word Garden blog.” Learn more about her on her blog.

Appraisal:

I read
because I love to lose myself in another world and experience life
vicariously through someone else’s eyes. Also, as an aspiring
writer, I read to learn. For me, reading Adrift in the Sound was
tantamount to attending a fiction writing master class.

Tactile
scene settings sucked me into a story as multi-layered as one of
Lizette’s beautifully described oil paintings. Ms. Campbell colors
her scenes with fine details, often transforming the settings into
another character to add emotion. For example, after an argument with
her father, Lizette turns her back on him and the house and takes the
path in the rain toward the small cabin her mother used as her
artists’ studio. Lizette perceives the cabin like this: “Two big
windows stared into the tangled garden, watching the house through
rain-streaked eyes.” Or her view of the car ferry that will take
her to Orcas Island in the Puget Sound, where much of the story
unfolds: “The wide-bodied boat nudged the dock, bounced against the
pylons, settled into its berth like a lumbering beast nestling into a
safe burrow.” Or the way the ocean appears to her: “The afternoon
sun scattered silver sequins across the water.” I confess I have a
ton more highlights on my Kindle; so many I had to stop myself.
Unable to choose which to use in the review, I simply chose the first
three—they’re all exceptional.

Lizette’s
world is populated by a cast of complex, multi-faceted characters.
Many are unpleasant. All were real to me. A brutal sexual assault
early in the story permanently scars Lizette and scarred this reader
along with her. It happened because she takes crazy chances and
trusts the wrong people. But don’t see her as a weakling. On a
number of occasions she does significant harm to those whom she
perceives as a threat. Although, as I watched Lizette become a danger
to others, I was never quite sure of her intentions. That’s a
measure of how off-balance the author kept me, and how hard I was
rooting for Lizette.

Lizette’s
affinity for the native Indians who live on Orcas and form her
support group provides more wonderful characters whose lifestyle
grounds the story in history and in nature. I have no connection with
Native Indians or their customs, but I found their lives and beliefs
and plain commonsense added to the palette of an already colorful
story.

The novel
is a deep, slow burn, and not without humor. One particular scene
involving a large snake and an unpleasant junkie had me laughing so
loud I woke my wife (I read at night). A larger-than-life
character--self-described poet, Toulouse--is described in the eyes of
Lizette’s friend, Marian thusly: “Toulouse moved off with a
flourish, tipping a goodbye from the rim of his foolish hat. Marian
watched him go, his self-importance shoved up his ass like a mop
handle.”

Complex,
troubled, and gifted, Lizette connects with the natural world on such
a deep level that she pulled me along until I stood beside her
marveling at the natural beauty of an ocean wave, or the fearsome
power of the killer whales as they hunt in the Sound, or the subtle
simplicity of an old Indian woman dancing in a mask of feathers and
bear skin. She broke my heart as we watched a seal taken by a
predator, or a pet dog injured. I know, as she does, it’s natural.
You can’t interfere, you can’t help—but still, you share the
stab of her guilt.

With more
“Oh, didn’t see that coming” moments than I had any right to
expect, Adrift in The Sound
is the best book I’ve read in a long time.

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